Privacy Cryptocurrencies… Checking Out Zcoin (XZC)

The past few days I’ve been writing about privacy cryptocurrencies. If you haven’t seen them yet check out my pieces on Monero, Zcash, and PIVX.

Today it’s Zcoin. Currently trading around $13 with a market cap of $40 million, it’s the smallest of the privacy cryptocurrencies I’ve covered so far.

Zcoin implements the Zerocoin Protocol which uses zero-knowledge proofs to guarantee complete financial privacy and anonymity.

The founder and core developer of Zcoin is Poramin Insom. He’s the first person to implement stealth addresses in QT-Wallets. He has a master’s degree in Information Security from John Hopkins University. There he wrote a paper on the practical implementation of the Zerocoin protocol. He also worked on Vertcoin (VTC) at one point.

In addition to Poramin, there are five developers, a community manager, a China liaison, and two strategic advisors who work on Zcoin. The team is active. If you have time check out the update videos from community manager Reuben Yap, he knows his stuff.

Zcoin is similar to Zcash, but instead of using zk-SNARKs like Zcash, Zcoin uses RSA technology. RSA is more widely used and understood than zk-SNARKs, so it’s battle tested. It also uses much less computational power than Zcash, so transactions are quicker.

Zcoin has an ambitious roadmap which you can find here. This year Zcoin became the first cryptocurrency to implement Merke Tree Proof for PoW. The advantage of MTP is that it solves miner centralization imbalances. One of the next projects on the roadmap is implementing Znodes.

This will create a hybrid PoS and PoW system and will incentivize nodes to support the network. This is becoming a popular model and is used by DASH and PIVX.

On the table for 2018 is the Sigma Protocol, aka the trustless setup. This is big as this is one of the big criticisms of privacy cryptocurrencies such as XZC and ZEC. You can see what it’s about in the graphic below.

Right now there’s roughly 3 million XZC outstanding and it will have an ultimate supply of 21 million like bitcoin. You can find the full details of the distribution in the FAQ.

To learn more about Zcoin check out the white paper.

One last neat fact, according to this market analysis video of Zcoin, it’s Zerocoin protocol is being implemented in seven other cryptocurrencies. I think that says a lot.

This one just may have the most upside of the bunch. I do own a few XZC tokens. Of course, this is not an investment recommendation, do your own due diligence before buying.

What do you think of Zcoin?

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